Press release

Elad Lassry Sept. 20 – Dec. 9, 2018 Preview: Wednesday September 19, 6 – 9 p.m. Press visit and breakfast: Wednesday September 19, 9.30 a.m.

Exhibition curator: Xavier Franceschi

Elad Lassry, Untitled (assignments), 2018 (detail) © Elad Lassry

Contacts: Isabelle Fabre, Communications Manager > +33 1 76 21 13 26 > [email protected] Lorraine Hussenot, Press Relations Manager > +33 1 48 78 92 20 / +33 6 74 53 74 17 > [email protected]

Page 1 le plateau, paris Le frac île-de-France- reçoit le soutien du Conseil 22, rue des Alouettes régional d’île-de-France, du ministère de la 75 019 Paris, France Culture – Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles d’île-de-France et de la Mairie de T +33 (0)1 76 21 13 41 Paris. Membre du réseau Tram, de Platform, fraciledefrance.com regroupement des FRAC et du Grand Belleville

The frac île-de-france is presenting the first exhibition in France of the artist Elad Lassry, at Le Plateau (Paris). Lassry was born in 1977 in and lives and works in . His work with photography, film and sculpture explores the production and reception of pictures―their meaning and essence, rather than the technology used to create them.

Elad Lassry is an heir to the Pictures Generation theorized by art critic Douglas Crimp―American artists who utilized appropriation and alteration in their détournements of the media icons of the 1970s and 80s. Lassry favors figurative images, gleaned from a range of sources including advertising, fashion, film, textbooks and scientific publications. Appropriating them for himself, he shifts and interrogates reality in today’s image-dominated world.

His outrageously colorful, theatrically framed photographs reference the formal appeal of commercial imagery, a Pop aesthetic and a structuralist approach to re-staging, concealment and reframing. Lassry questions the true nature of our relationship with pictures: do we interpret them and decode the information they contain, or do we simply experience them? With his gently ironic re-staging of images, showing how they are structured visually through processes of composition, reproduction, duplication, abstraction and interpretation, the artist follows the readymade tradition and the structuralist movement in American experimental film, focusing on form as much as content.

Elad Lassry aims to show what he calls the “contemporary condition” of photography―a flexible, appealing entity but one that is disconnected from reality: “I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories. And the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph.”

The exhibition at Le Plateau features a series of new works specially produced by Lassry for the occasion.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1977, Elad Lassry lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been shown at many international exhibitions: Vancouver Art Gallery, Elad Lassry, curated by , Vancouver (2017); Galerie Francesca Pia, Hans-Peter Feldmann / Elad Lassry, Zurich (2017); David Kordansky Gallery, Elad Lassry, Los Angeles (2015); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Sensory Spaces 3, Rotterdam (2014); 303 Gallery, Elad Lassry, New York (2013); The Kitchen, New York (2012); PAC, Milan (2012); Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2012); the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2010); Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2010) and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions: the 54th ; Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, The Photographers' Gallery, London (2011); The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2011); Sculpture Center, New York; New Photography 2010, , New York (2010) and Younger Than Jesus, , New York (2009). He is represented by Galerie Francesca Pia in Zurich, the White Cube gallery in London and 303 Gallery in New York.

le plateau, paris 22, rue des Alouettes, 75019 Paris Tel. +33 (0) 1 76 21 13 41 / www.fraciledefrance.com

Wednesday to Sunday, 2-7 p.m. Late openings (“plateau-apéro”) until 9 p.m. on the first Wednesday of every month / Admission free

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